Reflections on the national history standards.

In a country where arguing about politics, baseball, and every other conceivable topic is a national pastime, it should be no surprise that we argue about history - particularly about how to teach the past to young students in the schools. Yet, in the heated controversy over the National History Standards so much ink was spilled and television and radio time occupied that future historians may conclude that the three plainly presented curricular guidelines making up the standards represent a special moment in our very old arguments about rethinking the past. This essay examines the genesis of the National History Standards, the controversy over them, and what their future is likely to be.

WHO WROTE THE BOOKS

As with national standards in science, civics, geography, and the arts, the history standards originated in the National Education Goals adopted by the nation's fifty governors in 1989; in these goals, state leaders specified one of the key goals as the creation of challenging discipline-based standards. Endorsed by President George Bush, these goals led to a Congressionally appointed National Council on Education Standards in 1992. As a result of this mandate, funding for writing the history standards came from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the Department of Education, headed by Lynne Cheney and Lamar Alexander respectively. The task of coordinating the writing of standards fell to the National Center for History in the Schools at UCLA, earlier funded by NEH.

Aware that history was a dynamic field and a contested terrain, the History Standards Project, cochaired by Charlotte Crabtree, an expert on K-12 social studies, and me, Director of the National Center for History in the Schools, built a structure for involving dozens of national organizations concerned with history education. In sharp contrast to how curricular frameworks are constructed in other countries (usually in ministries of education), the Project cast a nationwide net to maximize democratic involvement. Components of the Project included the following:

* a policy-setting body, called the National Council for History Standards, consisting of the presidents of nine major organizations and twenty-two other nationally recognized administrators, historians, and teachers.

* two taskforces of teachers in World and United States history - drawn equally from elementary, middle, and high schools - who would work with academic historians to draft the standards.

* nine organizational focus groups that would critique drafts of the standards as they were generated.